1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the display, editing, and automated generation of scheduled tasks within an electronic calendaring system.
2. Description of Related Background Art
Electronic calendaring systems have become a common and essential tool for organizing one's personal and business affairs. These systems enable users of all ages and occupations to quickly and easily monitor tasks and appointments, coordinate assignments and meetings with others, and, do so over a variety of computer systems and devices asynchronously and with little to no technical support. The newest of these systems encompass an array of related functions: to-do list functions, phone books, notes, journals, electronic mail, wireless communications, and, recently, integration of these functions into mobile phones and hand-held GPS devices.
Given their wide-spread availability, intuitive interface, and high degree of integration with other applications and services, electronic calendars represent an attractive platform for supporting automated scheduling of programs of timeslots and tasks for small groups of users. Several challenges must be addressed, however.
First, an improved method for displaying tasks in electronic calendars is needed. From a visual perspective, tasks are weakly integrated into the calendar regions of current electronic calendars. The convention is for tasks to be displayed in a separate region of the user interface with little or no reference to a completion date, start date, work period, or timescale. When dates are present, the systems often do not allow the user to specify start and end times, just dates. Users do have the option of inputting task information in the form of an appointment or event object, thereby displaying a particular task as a time-bound graphical object in the user's calendar, but, this work-around is cumbersome to manage for more than a small number of tasks.
Second, new editing methods are needed to efficiently manage the increased volume and levels of detail which are introduced along with the display of multiple timeslots, tasks, and even sub-groups or other intermediate hierarchies.
Finally, a relatively powerful template program item generation method is needed. Set-up costs, maintenance costs, and program change costs are likely to be too high with simple template mechanisms to ensure a viable market for products of this type. What are needed instead are template mechanisms which minimize the number of templates required to support large and diverse user groups, which facilitate the exchange of templates among users, and which allow template designers to anticipate normal changes in a user's circumstances or requirements over the course of following a particular template program.